At present, only certain amounts of discrete information regarding the global flow of various commodities is available in real-time or near real-time. Real-time or near real-time information is of particular interest to commercial traders, economists, and others. Maritime fleet managers may receive reports of ship positions and collect information regarding the disposition of their own ships and their respective cargos. However, this information is not largely publicly available and generally pertains only to specific vessels and is not associated with other data. Information regarding shipping traffic to and from various ports is typically gathered by port authorities and may be publicly available, however such information is often limited in geographic scope.
A large number of variables that affect the global flow of commodities are not accounted for by present maritime data providers in a manner that allows interested parties to receive accurate updates regarding projected arrival times for vessels and their cargos. For example, weather, political unrest, piracy, and even commodity pricing can cause vessels to alter course and speed. Further, data that incorporates these variables for accurately predicting worldwide flow of certain commodities involving virtually all shipping of those commodities around the world is not presently accessible to the interested parties such as traders of the subject commodities or economists interested in global economic trends. These interested parties are currently forced to rely on anecdotal, untimely, spotty reports, and incomplete modeling for the data sets they require.
Heretofore known systems and methods for tracking commodity flows have generally been directed to acquiring tactical information and have been limited in geographic scope. Typical existing systems are static and based on past ship movements, for example, but do not provide accurate information based upon current ship positions.
Heretofore known systems and methods for tracking commodity flows have focused on acquiring information from only one mode of transportation (e.g., pipelines) or a limited number of transportation modes. Typical existing systems do not provide an intermodal picture that combines data such as tracking of seaborne commodities in transit with cargo information collected from other transportation modes (e.g., pipelines, freight trains, trucks, and airplanes).